The Future of MATLAB and Mathematical Interpreters – Going Mobile?
MATLAB has existed on the desktop and remains there to this day. However as the popularity of the iPhone and the buzz of the Apple tablet, Andriod phones, etc has pointed out, there are a large number of users who want to migrate to a mobile platform. Will MATLAB? Will any mathematical interpreter?
An interpreter may not seem an obvious choice but I can recall, along with many others, pulling out my calculator frequently during courses and for homework. Recently, I came across the iPhone app, iMathlab, on sale from the app store, and while it’s a light weight version of MATLAB or Octave, it’s a true mathematical interpreter made for a phone! As an engineer I can now make a phone call, plot a normal distribution, generate a random sample and make a histogram of data and then jump back onto my call all in a single device.
While the phone may not the ultimate form factor, it’s simply too small to work for any lengthy period of time, the upcoming tablet does seem to offer a more suitable form for the user who wants to seriously buckle down on their platform for 10 to 20 minutes at a time.
This raises the idea as to where will interpreters migrate in the upcoming years? I, personally, have been wondering when an open source project will migrate to a Google App Engine to take over a server and offer a dynamic interpreter capable of calculating with the vast server resources maintained by Google. Need a small lab comparable to Los Alamos? It’s there waiting for you to tap its potential.
With smart phones, a forthcoming tablet, and other web services taking over a larger and larger segment of the computing world it’s going to be a very interesting and dynamic area of software and services to see where and how any number of mathematical tools move into this area.
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Merry Christmas from Advanced Matlab Code
This one by Anselm
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Matlog: Logistics Engineering Matlab Toolbox
The Matlab Toolbox Matlog was developed for use in the course ISE 754 at NCSU. The toolbox contains functions for solving the following types of problems:
- Facility location: Continuous minisum facility location, alternate location-allocation (ALA) procedure, discrete uncapacitated facility location
- Vehicle routing: VRP, VRP with time windows, traveling salesman problem (TSP)
- Networks: Shortest path, min cost network flow, minimum spanning tree problems
- Geocoding: U.S. city or ZIP code to longitude and latitude, longitude and latitude to nearest city, Mercator projection plotting
- Layout: Steepest descent pairwise interchange (SDPI) heuristic for QAP
- General purpose: Linear programming using the revised simplex method procedure, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP)
- Data: U.S. cities with populations of at least 10,000, U.S. highway network (Oak Ridge National Highway Network), U.S. 3- and 5-digit ZIP codes
Matlog Reference
Matlog Reference (HTML) provides a listing of help information for each function in the Matlog toolbox.
Matlab References
Basic Concepts in Matlab, provides a short overview of Matlab.
The Documentation, Manuals, and Tutorials on the MathWorks website (the developers of Matlab) provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference source for Matlab; in particular, Getting Started (HTML) or (PDF) provides a good introduction to Matlab.
Installing Matlog
If connected to the NCSU network:
Before using the toolbox for the first time and before starting Matlab, you should copy the file startup.m to your home directory. This file creates a path to the toolbox each time you start Matlab. Matlog is then accessible only from the NCSU network. Other commands that you would like to have executed each time you start Matlab can also be added to the file; for example, the format compact command is at the end of the file and is used to eliminate the blank lines that would otherwise appear between each line of output at the command window.
First time using toolbox, copy startup.m file to your home directory:
http://www.ise.ncsu.edu/kay/matlog/startup.m
Keep this file in the directory that opens when you start Matlab.
Execute startup.m. each time you start Matlab.
If accessing local install of Matlog:
To use Matlog on an off-campus network, you will need a local version of Matlog. Copy the following zipped file containing the Matlog directory to your local computer:
Extracting the file will create the folder matlog. You should then update Matlog by using one of the methods described below. It is quickest to manually update via updates.zip when Matlog is first installed, and then automatically thereafter using matlogupdate.
Assuming you are using Version R2009a of Matlab and that you have placed Matlog into your C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2009a\toolbox\local\ folder, the following statements can be used for your startup.m file by saving them as a new file or adding them to an existing startup.m file (you should not use the NCSU network startup.m file on when not connected to the campus network).
% Example startup.m file to access local install of Matlog path(path, 'C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2009a\toolbox\local\matlog') % Put extracted matlog folder here matlogupdate % Run to check for Matlog updates format compact % Run to eliminate blank lines
Updating Matlog
Individual files in Matlog will change on a regular basis (e.g., fixing errors). The entire Matlog zip file is not updated as frequently. Instead, there are two ways to get the updates:
- Automatically: The Matlog function matlogupdate.m can be run to automatically download updates to Matlog files. You can add matlogupdate.m to your startup.m file to have it check for updates each time you start Matlab.
- Manually: All of the updated files are available in the zipped file updates.zip (this method will work if, for some reason, matlogupdate is not working). Extract the files and then copy them into your Matlog folder, replacing any existing files of the same name. A new updates.zip file is created each time Matlog is updated.
See log file for a list of Matlog updates to date.
Contact
Michael G. Kay, Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.
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